Tad recklessly decided to take a cab uptown to peek masochistically at the Excelsior School’s staff Christmas reception. He knew he shouldn’t, but he told himself he wanted to gauge his fellow teachers’ response to his getting fired. He imagined they might see him as a folk hero, via martyrdom, of Mr. Hyer’s plutophilic rule. Most titillating of all, though, was the knowledge that he was excluded from the party, which made it mythical in its unavailability, even though it would be merely a minor adult version of recess. It made him ache to be there, just as knowing that Gabe was putatively Simon’s inflamed his desire. At Hale, he’d despised the elitism of the mysterious Serpent Club but was hurt when they tapped his preppy dolt roommate and not him. At restaurants, the dinner special they’d just run out of always sounded most delicious to Tad.
“Cats have nine lives, but you don’t!” cooed an actress’s recorded voice in the cab. “So buckle up!” Something was wrong, though, and the tape played repeatedly as Tad rode uptown and passed the patchwork of store windows, brightening in contrast to the deepening darkness. “Cats have nine lives, but you don’t! So buckle up! Cats have nine lives, but you don’t! So buckle up!” Tad pleaded with the driver to turn it off, but the beleaguered African, who appeared to speak little English, indicated that the tape was broken and there was no choice but to endure the announcement until they reached their destination far up in the East Eighties. Signs scrolled past his window declaring BABY NEEDS GIFTS; GUARANTEED DELIVERY; EVERYTHING MUST GO. “Cats have nine lives, but you don’t! So buckle up! Cats have nine lives, but you don’t! So buckle up!” Tad began to worry that he was being warned against visiting the site of his humiliation.
Once he got out of the taxi, though, the falling snow and the stillness of the side street calmed him. He noticed through the window of the Italian restaurant indirectly across from Excelsior that its staff had all sat down to dinner together. Their black bow ties and white-aproned uniforms made them look all nearly identical, and their communion somehow reassured Tad. Despite the darkness, it was only five o’clock, too early for clangorous dinner crowds vying for seating. Wide avenues offer vistas, but narrow side streets offer epiphanies.
The school lay halfway between First and Second Avenue, and Tad was the only pedestrian in sight as he approached the converted town house. Here the snow was deeper, because fewer feet and auto tires had dissipated it. In the branches of the large curbside tree outside the school were several windblown plastic grocery bags, but what would ordinarily be an eyesore had been glorified by the snow, covered by it to resemble the nests of an unknown Arctic bird. Tad remembered seeing the school’s custodian occasionally poking at previous such airborne litter with a rake, acting on Mr. Hyer’s orders to keep a shipshape tree.
The lights were bright on the second story, and Tad knew the official party was up in the main activity room, with Mr. Hyer celebrating his first completed semester with trustees and otherwise-involved parents. He courted their company more than he did his staff’s. There would be no children in the building, an odd sensation, compounded by the fact that Tad was going there at night and not during the day. It would be like visiting an amusement park when everything is locked and still.
He could see movement through the upper windows, but he didn’t look directly at them, fearing the creepiness that would ensue if Justin’s excitable mom or Mr. Hyer happened to look out and locked gazes with him, lurking there like a demented ragamuffin, ready to go postal despite the fact that this was a private school.
In the darker front bay window downstairs glowed two unrelated mechanical figures, secondhand electrified puppets from a department store’s warehouse, donated by one of the students’ chief-executive fathers. The scene didn’t make much sense, since it consisted of an emphatically elderly elf hammering thin air—if he had ever had a toy to hammer, it was lost, but he neurotically persisted—and a robed Victorian choirboy, with a slowly lolling head and outspread arms, rotating in aimless benediction, or else in a lugubrious attempt at flight. The used choirboy’s head had a wiring problem, however, and at the end of each of its rotations it would shiver as if from a nervous disorder. To Tad, it was the only moment when you might mistake the figure for alive.
In the unattended vestibule, warm but dank with wet boots and sodden overcoats, a student prankster had rearranged the letters on the bulletin board to say WELCOME SATAN. The party was a well-behaved one, and only a faint blur of conversing voices drifted down the banistered stairs. From the back of the ground floor, Tad heard more clearly the unguarded, liquor-loosened voice of one teacher he knew was also disgruntled, and he cautiously approached it. Now he knew why he’d risked awkward discovery. The sneaking around was exciting—it made him feel powerful.
He edged past the math and science room, which was unoccupied but had the lights on. On a blackboard full of calculations, someone had scrawled PLEASE SAVE, which intrigued Tad until he saw the next chalkboard, which read PLEASE DO NOT ERASE US!—a coy plea for their lives from normally emotionless numbers.
In the art room, off to the side, he heard several of the staff, who, presumably, were having a low-key but nonetheless imported beer, laughing. He could hear the gentle yet methodical voice of Irene, the music teacher.
“So we get to the part that goes ‘Gone away is the blue bird, Here to stay is a new bird’—and Justin—he is so cute—asks me what the ‘new bird’ is exactly. And I say, ‘I think it’s a beautiful red cardinal!’ And he says, ‘But the cardinal is already here, it’s not new!’ I admit, I was stumped!”
Tad leaned through the doorway, as if presenting himself in parts would minimize any shock. “Well, I know it’s just a ski-lodge ha-ha song, but any chance it could be the Holy Spirit?”
“Whoa! Tad!” said Margery, the math teacher. “What are you doing here?”
“I mean, we’re glad to see you!” Irene amended, like that final fairy who takes the sting off the curse on Sleeping Beauty.
The two women were the only two people at this remote outpost of the festivities, but they were Tad’s favorites on the teaching staff. Irene Weinstein and Margery Dawes had been confusing to Tad when he first joined the Excelsior staff. Irene was Chinese by birth and her adoptive parents, who rescued her from the “one child only and only boys matter” policy, were Jewish, and while Tad struggled to reconcile the text with the illustration, he also confused Irene’s function with Margery’s, who was black. Tad had presumed the Asian woman taught math and the black woman taught music, but it was exactly the opposite, and he could see the annoyance on Margery’s face when she kept having to correct his misconception. Further bewildering to him was the fact that she claimed never to have heard the nursery rhyme about “See-saw, Margery Daw, Jack shall have a new master.” When she playfully accused him of making it up, he asked around for corroboration, but Irene, Mr. Hyer, foreigner Mimi, and the few children he recited it for all claimed never to have heard it in their lives. Tad kept meaning to find it in an anthology and show it to Margery, but adult duties kept distracting him from this trivia project.
“We just heard about what happened,” Irene said, her voice keen, although she seemed unsure what to say. “I’m so sorry!”
“I’m angry,” said Margery.
It was a typical response for both of them. Irene was sorry even when things weren’t her fault, a weakness Tad found attractive. Margery got righteous regularly, which Tad admired but didn’t find attractive, since he preferred relationships with the uncritical. There was something about being a fact-facer professionally, as with scientist Nat, that made sweetness unthinkable for Margery.
The room was being used to store supplies for the party upstairs, so pillars of unopened plastic cups and cartons of mixers surrounded them, giving the illusion these women were stevedores in nice dresses, taking a lazy work break. An opened box of chocolates sitting on a nearby table looked decimated. On the wall behind them were posted scrawled crayon pictures of Christmas trees that variously resembled maladjusted triangles, shaky electrical towers, shaggy rocket ships, or, inevitably, penises of other worlds. A manufactured poster on the side wall featured an intentionally clumsy sunflower drawn by an adult professional to resemble children’s art, with the motto “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” Tad wanted to believe it, but it was a phrase that had become equated with self-delusory good cheer. He was more afraid that today might simply be the next day of his life so far.
“Honestly, I didn’t do anything.” Tad hoped to vindicate himself.
“Of course not! You don’t have to defend yourself!” Margery assured him. “That woman is crazy, I think. Yip yip yip! It’s like she’s her own little nervous bites-everybody lapdog!”
“What if Mr. Hyer catches you here?” Again, Irene’s voice was concerned, but she had no idea what the consequences might be.
“Oh, relax,” Margery, who was a beer ahead of Irene, countered. “I doubt he’ll come down here, and even if he does, what can he do? He’ll ask you to leave quietly. Andy’s got his faults, but he’s not gonna throw things.” Margery referred to Mr. Hyer as Andy because his closely guarded first name was Andrew and she figured he’d detest being called Andy. “Have a beer with us.”
“We’re having our own little antiprom,” Irene whispered, like the high school girl she still seemed to be. “The atmosphere upstairs was too stifling!”
“Yeah,” said Margery. “Like I need to stand around and hear about proper Ritalin dosages from Rita.” Rita was Justin’s mother. Margery called people she didn’t like by their first names, as a kind of stealthy disrespect. “Or about how her mailman has been withholding letters from her ex-husband! Truly! She is out of her mind!”
“Yeah, well, too bad she isn’t out of her money,” Tad sighed, then sat in a child’s chair only slightly too small for him. “Then she might not have so much influence.”
Margery, playing the bursar, handed Tad a bottle of beer from the case being stored nearby. Obviously, the crowd upstairs had shown no demand for beer. “And sugar, I’d rather live through last year’s head lice-scare again than have another goal-structuring chat with Andy boy!”
As he began to twist the bottle cap off, Tad had a moment of self-doubt that it might require an opener and that he’d shred his flesh trying to remove it manually. Or, worse, that he’d be unable to open it even though it had a twist-off cap. Luckily, it yielded without incident. The beer was warm, but in a classroom it seemed enticingly out of place.
“I got some thank-you candy.” Irene hesitantly indicated the nearly empty box.
“I’m afraid it’s all over but the marzipan,” Margery drawled.
“This is fine.” Tad raised his bottle like a Eucharistic chalice.
“Honestly, Tad, it’s outrageous, and I know once everyone comes back from Christmas break, they’ll rally to get your job back,” Irene said. “No one believes Rita.”
Margery nodded, seconding the motion. “The woman’s obtuse. Acutely obtuse, if that’s geometrically possible.”
Tad felt a rush of warmth like the ones he’d felt with Nat and Bonny earlier, when they’d offered their support unexpectedly. He tried to downplay it, in his nervous pride. “Thanks. We’ll just have to wait and see. Um … what were you laughing about when I came in?”
Margery seemed to welcome changing the subject to round-edged mundanities. “We were just reviewing the chills and spills of the big Christmas performance.”
“Oh, right!” Roiling in the flames of the newly fired, Tad had forgotten the school’s Christmas program had been on Friday night. Irene could rule the eighty-eight keys of the piano like a tyrant, but she had trouble controlling her animate charges, lisping kindergartners meandering without concentration through what sounded like “Wise Up Shepherd and Holler.” The devious boy who’d started the insincere “I love you” craze the previous month had conspiratorially enlisted all the older boys to change the words when they performed “On December Five and Twenty” to “Send My Gift in Fives and Twenties.” It reminded Tad of his own juvenile song sabotage with Nat, and he wished he’d said good-bye to him at brunch.
“Personally, I thought it was funny,” said realist Margery. “That song gave me the creeps. Did I hear those words right? ‘To Mary born alive this cold December twenty-five.’ Right there in A minor or whatever it is you have to think about the idea of a stillborn, outside, in subzero conditions! Whew! I’ve seen enough of that on the news!”
“Uh-oh!” Irene sat up. She heard footsteps and reacted like a teen caught passing notes. She had the talent to be a concert performer, but, like Tad, she got frightened at the miniature Judgment Day of auditions.
It was Mimi Milieu, the complacently unhelpful secretary who’d always screwed up Tad’s projects without any hint of apology afterward. She had come down from the official party to fetch more paper napkins, and she wore the same pearls and perfectly tailored black suit that she wore every day. At first, she mistook Tad for a visiting student.
“Hello, cheri!” she grinned at him, odd behavior, considering she had sat beside Mr. Hyer as he fired Tad. As always, she then seemed startled to realize to whom she was speaking. “Oh! It’s you!” Her mouth puckered as if from an unexpectedly sour drink. “I don’t think you should be here!” She was the henchmadame, a svelte Smee to Mr. Hyer’s Captain Hook, a flighty crocodile bird nervously removing the ticks that beset its vaster master.
Tad bluffed. “I came back to get my tools from my locker.”
“What tools? You tell stories, you don’t have any tools.” Mimi didn’t know he also didn’t have a locker.
“I … Well, I just didn’t get to say good-bye to anyone.”
Mimi relented. Christmas tempered even her policy of intransigence. “But I tell you, you must not stay. I give you a five-minute warning. We do not want a scene.”
Margery looked at the ceiling as if the proceedings were too embarrassing to watch. “You gonna summon the gendarmes?”
Mimi offered no comeback but the cold stare that is meant to indicate nobility that will not stoop. After she left the room, Irene took a relieved breath.
Margery returned her gaze to Tad. “I really can’t bear that glorified receptionist Mimi! Mimi! Her name is so perfect. All she thinks about is Her Her!” For a moment, Tad in his Irishness felt like the ethnic three were in the servants’ quarters, gossiping about the masters upstairs. At one time, this town house no doubt had had servants and masters.
“Hullo!”
It was Gordon, Irene’s violinist boyfriend. He was mild and scrawny, with nineteenth-century-style wire-rim glasses and a ragged long coat. He had the unruly uncombed hair that gave classical music the nickname “longhair.” Tad had noted there was a strain of straight man who could easily be mistaken for gay, who date Asian women. As always, though, bedroom politics are a secret society.
“Hi, Gordon!” Tad said, and stood. He had to go, and besides, he imagined Gordon’s arrival introduced involuntary male rivalry he didn’t want to conduct. Gordon was neutral and benign, but he was taller than Tad. He had also just been accepted by the Philharmonic, although he was to begin as the last-chair violin, so he was to be both exalted and demeaned simultaneously. Tad mentally filed a note that orchestras are hierarchies, too, with the violinist concertmaster as the conductor king’s mistress or favorite son, and the semicircle fanned out from that center like a family tree. The percussion section haunted its periphery, the elegant violinists’ caveman cousins, pounding the drums.
“Hi, Tad,” Gordon returned, moderato. Either he hadn’t heard about Tad’s firing or it didn’t affect him. Gordon hung his frayed old coat on the back of a chair, but it still spread out on the surrounding floor.
Mr. Hyer’s booming, practiced laugh could be heard from upstairs. Tad assumed one of the trustees had just told an unfunny joke. “I’d better get going,” he said, zipping up the jacket he’d never even taken off.
Irene took his hand, as if to pledge Tad for her sorority. “We know you didn’t do anything wrong. He can’t fire you for no reason.”
“Well, it is a private school. We’re not union employees or anything.”
Margery offered a footnote. “Well, he is technically a member of the human race.”
“Tad, we won’t let it pass. You can count on us,” Irene repeated.
Margery called after him as he left the room. “And even if worse comes to worst, you can make more money waiting tables than you do here.”
“Well, I appreciate the support!” Tad called back. It was easier for him than being grateful eye-to-eye.
“Um … did I miss something?” he heard Gordon say.
Tad managed to slip out without encountering Mr. Hyer, so he considered his exploit as an espionage mission accomplished. He was ultimately headed to the West Village for dinner, so he walked west as far as Park Avenue, then downtown. The snow enrobed the street’s intentional expense in intentionless simplicity. Tad passed glass and gold doorways of insincerely grinning doormen. He was glad there was no staff at Garth’s building, so at least he owed no Christmas tips.
Snow was still falling. Somewhere, again, church bells began to ring, indicating six o’clock. Tad thought of the Angelus, and the workers he was descended from praying in the fields, of his grandmother saying the rosary to keep goblins at bay, and how she cautioned him not to walk the wrong way around a church, to the left, or widdershins, or he’d be liable to the penalty of permanent abduction to Avalon. That was part of her theory about what had happened to her arguably missing husband.
Tad impulsively decided to grab a cab again, to go downtown for what his college friend Minus had promised would be a small, peaceful dinner. Two cabs in one day was an almost-unprecedented expense for him, especially since he was unemployed now, but it excited him to be momentarily heedless, and he looked forward to this gathering. As the stores of all sorts and crowds of all stripes and looming clownish skyscrapers wheeled past again, made into phantasmic swirls by the darkness and the cab’s speed, it occurred to him, organizer of universes that he was supposed to be, that the world was a beautiful full-color encyclopedia, only the entries were in random order and it was written in an indecipherable language.